Woo!
What a crazy little while it's been!
How totally frackin exciting was it that Phoenix landed safely on the Mars polar region. Woot! Go you crazy rocket guys!! Yeah! Those rocket thrusters were fully sick. Why has it taken so long for actual space missions to look like our very well rendered games? I swear that "artists impression" footage was taken almost directly from "Masters of Orion". We all knew the airbags were dodgy as all fuck.
Congratulations earthlings on taking one more step towards becoming Martians.
Here's the master on the subject:
"Fools, fools. There is life on Mars, and it's us. We are the Martians now."
Ray Bradbury, Mars's first poet-in-non-residence.
Also, in other news of massive importance to the geek community, Neal Stephenson is releasing a new novel on September 9 of this year! So soon! Only 4 short years since "System of the World" was unleashed upon our puny minds we will receive "Anathem" (no, that's not a typo). I don't know anything else about it! Wait, and read it, and be happy.
Oh, that's right, and then there's this utterly utterly ridiculous situation where the NSW police force seem to think that it's about 1898, and that art is to blame! In a classic, one might be tempted to say textbook implementation, during a period of high economic stress (rates increasing! petrol prices increasing! chinese workers distracted from their factories by unpredictable natural phenomena!) what do we have? Why look, it's a very public condemnation of art as dirty pornography (I note, somewhat cynically, that many of the online news sources chose to run the unpixellated versions of the images). I refer, of course, to the new series of work by Australian photographer, Bill Henson.
his images are amazing. There's so much pap-art, it can be possible to forget what it's like to be confronted, really asked to engage with an artwork. I saw the image that went out to invite people to this opening (our Director is on the invite list) and it was captivating. Utterly astonishing and confronting. Sure. It's confronting.
That's what makes it so great - because this is the power of art - to reflect what you the viewer carry around inside you and never question. Then when it's projected - what do you see? You see your own darknesses, your own fears, or your own wonder and beauty. In these images, I see sadness and vulnerability. One of my work colleagues sees beauty of an almost transcendent nature. Talking to her about this has opened my eyes to her beauty and generosity (which has been a marvelous and unexpected benefit of this discussion!).
It is the yabbering and thoughtless reactions of people (such as, I'm sorry to say, Prime Minister Rudd) that contribute to an environment in which art of this nature and power is even more necessary. I think the attacks on this work make perfect sense for a culture where we have continued to dumb-down our public discourse, and where we have all but eliminated situations where there is any ambiguity or nuance. One of his previous series' images was in the Strange Cargo exhibition we hosted over last summer. Because of this kind of response, we arranged a "preview" viewing for the media and marketing teams of council so we could explain his work - knowing that if we were going to receive any complaints from our local audience, it would probably be for this naked and muddied girl being carried/dragged by two naked young men .... and yet (maybe because the town is so catholic) there was no complaint about this (but I got complaints about the monster/sculpture scaring young children)!
As a feminist I am sensitive to images of women which are exploitative, and his work asks us to look at that space, but from an angle of reflection about our own devaluation of youth, innocence and powerful transitional states. Any commercial on television is likely to be far more harmful and fundamentally exploitative than these amazing creatively fashioned (and I mean fashioned in the sense of consciously made, not in the modern sense of fashionably designed) images.
BTW, I'm not sure I *like* them ... I would buy different art for my walls (and I acknowledge too, that I am a long long way from being able to buy artworks of this status, so my opinion and knowledge must he held in that context). But I do know that when I am standing in front of one of his works from these series, I have that inner turmoil and satisfaction that comes from making an unexpected relationship with something, and that's when I know I've met some Art, and it has made a mark on me.
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